The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [121]
Nada accepted half a sandwich and walked to the window, blanket tight around her shoulders, and she pressed her head against the glass, searching for the narrow stroke of blue water in her mother’s skyline view.
43
SHE APPEARED in the open doorway of his tiny office, prettier than she had looked at the auction, her black hair curling at the ends around her face, her blouse and skirt fashionable and dry. Alberto wondered how long she had been waiting down the hall for one of his students to leave.
“Oh. Hello.” He stood. “Laura.”
She said, “I came to tell you not to call me.”
“I’m sorry. You didn’t have to drive all this way to do that.”
“I did.” For a long moment, it seemed that was all the explanation she would give. “Every other way I could contact you would be”—she looked to be debating the most circumspect word in her head—“discoverable. Unless they follow me, which I don’t believe they have any reason to do, speaking in person is mostly safe.”
“Please. Sit.”
“No. That’s all I came to say.”
“I don’t believe that. Not with gas prices what they are.”
She smiled. “My house is an oven. When I leave here, I’m going to my sister’s place in Michigan until power in the city comes back.”
“I thought they were close. Paper this morning had an interview with the CEO of ComEd.”
She laughed. “The power’s not coming on until they want it to.”
“‘They’?” Cepeda said. “Commonwealth Edison?”
She laughed again.
He corrected himself. “The Thousand.”
She said, “You shouldn’t have signed in at that auction yesterday. Not with your real name.”
“You did.”
“They already know who I am,” she said. “And I’m protected.”
“By whom?”
She didn’t respond, so he tried to guess. “Protected from the mathematici. Did they cause the blackout, too?”
Laura didn’t answer, but she didn’t leave.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s the truth.”
“How are you protected?”
“The important thing is, you’re not. They’ve noticed you now.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. “Please. Tell me. Why are you really here?”
“Marlena liked you. She said you were her favorite teacher.”
He nodded modestly.
“Can we go for a walk?”
“It’s boiling outside.”
“It’s cold in here.”
Walking to the elevator, they passed two dozen turquoise office doors, each identical to Alberto’s except for the notices, editorials, and cartoons tacked to adjacent bulletin boards by the resident professors. They stepped over a cross-legged student, lost between headphone hemispheres, waiting for Dr. Walker’s office hours to begin. The student acknowledged them with a surprised smile, then closed his eyes as they passed.
Outside, the tops of the elms wilted in the sun. There were few students on campus this time of year and they passed unnoticed across the manicured quad, away from the empty football stadium.
“Your father worked with Marlena. He’s in the box—the boxes within boxes—a member of the Thousand,” Alberto said finally, since she had said nothing. “But you’re not.”
He knew she wanted badly to tell him, that she was just filling herself with courage. “It is customary to pass the tradition down through families. But it is discretionary, as well. My father chose my brother but not me.”
“Because you’re a woman.”
“Gender has nothing to do with it,” she snapped, as if an insult to the organization that had rejected her was still an insult to her. “He passed me over because I believe in God.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There is a division.”
“Yes, I know. The mathematici and the acusmatici.”
“You think you know,” she said. “Actually, you probably know more than I do. The difference is, ninety-nine percent of what you know about them are lies. Lies they want you to believe.”
They walked past the Doric columns of Sampson’s administration building, off the path, over the stiff grass of the Chem Quad (called so because of the visual dominance of the ugly steel and stone chemistry building, rechristened last year for an aging